THEATER

THEATER; A Woman in Black Fascinated by Rouge

By ALVIN KLEIN

Published: November 29, 1998

IT takes the real thing to play the real thing. Tovah Feldshuh is a genuine, bona fide character actress and Diana Vreeland was the exemplar of artifice as heightened reality. In the Theater Works production of ''Full Gallop'' in Hartford, the two of them are one.

If the old-fangled designation character actor isn't being used much anymore, it's because its practitioners are hard to find. Ms. Feldshuh's total immersion into another being lifts the word versatility from show business hyperbole to communicative art. In a notable career, she has transformed herself into a Talmudic student disguised as a boy, a lusty Latin widow, a smothering and smoldering Jewish mother, a withering Jewish grandmother, a flamboyant star of stage and screen. And we're still counting.

Summoning her considerable experience as a cabaret performer, Ms. Feldshuh draws the audience in as the role's creator, Mary Louise Wilson, did not. She will offer you rouge or put aside a crystal vase of flowers that obstructs someone's sight line. But if you're crinkling a candy wrapper, beware.

Never misplacing the hauteur of the fabled ''Oracle of Beauty'' and ''High Priestess of Fashion'' (actually high and low, for ''a splash of bad taste'' was necessary to Mrs. Vreeland; it was no taste that offended), Ms. Feldshuh deflates pretense with one imperious look.

With the eternal self-esteem that true devotion between human beings bequeaths, she also tells a love story through spare references to a dapper man, Thomas R. Vreeland. Her recollection of his illness, the last chapter of their 40-year marriage, is an object lesson in the precision and economy of acting.

But first things first. ''I am out of a job,'' Mrs. Vreeland declares. Musing on her last day as editor in chief of Vogue, she startlingly recalls being told ''Your future is behind you.''

Ms. Feldshuh's exaggerated vocal attack, a multi-lingual drawl, is a wildly theatrical realization of Mrs. Vreeland's idiocyncratic accent, which was described by Christopher Hemphill, her collaborator on the gorgeous book of photographs and commentary, ''Allure,'' published in 1980, as ''rococo speech.''

''Her voice itself almost allows one to see the italics she speaks in,'' Mr. Hemphill wrote of Mrs. Vreeland ''for whom the tape recorder might have been invented.''

And wait till you see her, a spider woman in black, ''fascinated by rouge,'' stalking about in a flower flooded apartment (''You can never have enough flowers,'' she pronounces) of flaming red (''bright, cleansing, revealing red''). If Michael Schweikardt's evocative set design is not really scented, no one wants to know.

Ms. Feldshuh's grand Tony Award-nominated performance as Signora Maria Merelli, the tempestuous wife of a temperamental opera singer in ''Lend Me A Tenor,'' can now be perceived as a dress rehearsal for this new star turn. Whatever the behind-the-scenes power struggle or the hard-core facts of business accounted for her dismissal from Vogue, it is the divinely biased account of a spectacularly instinctual icon that matters. Besides, it isn't long before she agrees to be a consultant to the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York -- her last professional blaze of glory.

''You give them what they never knew they wanted,'' is how Mrs. Vreeland sums up a singular uncompetitive rule of success. ''Nobody gives a damn about authenticity if it's ugly,'' she declares. ''I want to be drowned in beauty.''

It comes as a surprise, a treat and, finally, a revelation to be unutterably moved by an image of largesse from whom you reasonably expect to feel distanced. She remembers a childhood of privilege -- seeing Isadora Duncan, Pavlova, Nijinksy -- and recounts a fabulous life (knowing everybody). ''It is beauty that is leaving this world,'' she bemoans, all too prophetically. ''There was a time people never ceased perfecting themselves.''

Whether she is appreciating the tonality of color -- ''magentas and mauves,'' ''the orange of Diaghilev, the orange that changed the century,'' or the blue of the Duke of Windsor's eyes, his ''azure aura,'' or relishing one puff of a Lucky Strike, Ms. Feldshuh imparts the essence of enjoyment.

Rob Ruggiero's graceful staging is a knowing acknowledgment of the skill and craft with which Mary Louise Wilson and Mark Hampton wrote the very model of a seamless one-woman piece (with funny French maid on the intercom) and the wit of Ms. Feldshuh's playing -- truly, she plays -- is a testament to the eccentricities and the resilience of an original character who may have invented the flair for reinvention. This is high theater.